Developing ASP.NET Applications with Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004

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Article Description

Macromedia's Dreamweaver has long been known as the premiere web site design tool for web professionals. But did you know that Dreamweaver allows you to build web applications that leverage J2EE, ColdFusion, and Microsoft .NET, among others? Matthew David introduces you to the exciting world of developing applications built on ASP.NET.

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Without a doubt, the most dominant web design tool today is Macromedia's
Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver enables visual designers to effortlessly create web
sites, and tools such as templates, CSS, and split-screen development have
driven Dreamweaver to the number-one spot. If you are a designer, however, you
know that at some point you'll need to extend Dreamweaver from a simple
HTML development tool to one that allows you to build database-driven solutions.

Once you begin to think deeply about database driven web sites, a whole new
level of complexity is introduced. For example, it's not safe for a web
browser to directly connect to a database. For this kind of thing, you'll
want to use an Application Server on your web server. There are many types of
application servers you can use, such as Java, ColdFusion, and PHP. The focus
here will be on Microsoft's ASP.NET.

Dreamweaver's support for ASP.NET solutions has helped me on many
occasions—from allowing me to build rapid prototypes to providing me with
the necessary tools for crafting solutions that integrate with Macromedia Flash.
Dreamweaver's strong support of ASP.NET has enabled me to build the type of
solutions I want—to the scale my customers need.

Dreamweaver is the only visual tool on the market that allows you to easily
build solutions for the following server environments:

ColdFusion

JSP

PHP

ASP (JavaScript)

ASP (VB Script)

ASP.NET (C#)

ASP.NET (VB.NET)

In this article you are going to learn how to set up and build a simple
solution using ASP.NET.

Getting Started

What you'll find as you begin to develop more complex server solutions
is that there is also more you'll need to set up in order to make the web
site work properly. In many ways, you can think of server-based solutions as
being like stargazing. When the stars align in your favor it can look like
heaven. But on a cloudy night, when everything is obscured, the whole thing
feels hopeless.

You'll be using Microsoft's infamous Northwinds Access Database to
build your application. If you don't have it, a copy is included with the
attached files.

You can develop on either Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, or
Windows XP Professional Edition. For each of these environments you will need to
ensure that Microsoft's web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), is
installed. In addition you will need to have the following:

Internet Information Server Supported Server

.NET Framework

Folder on the server that holds your files

Database

ASP.NET is supported by Microsoft's Internet Information Server version
5 or later. You will also need to be running the .NET Framework. For the example
detailed here, you'll need to use either the 1.0 or 1.1 Framework. If you
like, you can use the new 2.0 Framework slated to be released in November 2005.
The 2.0 framework is backwards-compatible with 1.0 and 1.1 solutions.

The folder you'll need to create will be hosted within the WWWROOT
folder for IIS. Typically, this is on your C drive. You can find it at:
C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\. Once you've found it, create a new folder called
Northwind.

Select the
Northwind folder. Right-click and then choose the Properties tab. Select the
Directory tab along the top. In the Application Settings section, choose Create
an Application Name by selecting the Create button. A name will be automatically
filled in as shown in Figure 2.